Is San Francisco Finally Abandoning Woke Politics?

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Back in 2021, “equity” was the board’s guiding principle of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. At its inaugural meeting in January of that year, the word was uttered nearly two dozen times. “Equity and racial justice are the issues that matter,” Catherine Stefani, a former member of the board, said then. Both to “our country and our city right now.”

Indeed, for over a decade, San Francisco has enacted policies rooted in social justice. In 2013, the city police department ordered officers not to pursue nonviolent offenders unless they posed a risk to public safety. Addicts were allowed to inject dangerous drugs like heroin and fentanyl in the open air, and overdoses soared. Meanwhile, scenes of people brazenly shoplifting goods from Bay Area drugstores went viral after petty crime was decriminalized. And Shamann Walton, the board president from 2021-2023, spearheaded a reparations plan for black residents that would have cost $600,000 per household.

Eventually, San Francisco’s voters said enough is enough.

In 2022, they booted their far-left district attorney Chesa Boudin from office after his policies led to rising crime. Mayor London Breed started shifting toward the center, declaring the open-air drug markets a “state of emergency” and spiking the reparations plan. And yet, voters replaced her last November with the more moderate Daniel Lurie, who promised to end the “perception that lawlessness is an acceptable part of life.” (Voters also overturned the law that decriminalized shoplifting.)

Now the city has a new board president, too—Rafael Mandelman, who told me he is embracing a more commonsense approach.

On January 8, the day of Lurie’s swearing-in, I got the chance to talk to Mandelman. I asked him: What needs to change to make San Francisco great again?